The downward spiral continues: Writing. Coffee. The perils of external combustion. Staying the course. Dogs and cats living together. Inspiration and creativity. Drugs, guns and fucking in the streets.

Monday, April 15, 2013

Axe Mortem

That turned out pretty well, actually.

It needs a few more passes to layer in more imagery. At about the two-thirds point, I started short-handing some of the writing, so some of that needs a bit of dusting to get it to match the flavor of the rest of the novel, but I'm otherwise pretty happy. Some of the prose near the end got fairly purple, but...if you're going to be writing pastiche about undead cowboys, then you might as well go for broke, I say.

My stories, at least the ones that I post here, fall into two basic camps: one-offs and seeds for potential novels.

Part of the the cool things about my New Year's resolution is that it gives me the opportunity to try a lot of different styles and ideas out. It's the world's biggest brain dump. One of my longer term goals is to go through the pile of story ideas I came up with this year and then see which ones can be expanded into full novels later on.

This is definitely one of those ideas. I have absolutely no idea where I want to take this--there's quite a few ways to go. And before I'd even start, I'd really need to do a lot more research. It's an alt-history story, so I'd need to construct a more detailed time-line to figure out where everything went wrong.

Side note: the House of Lords actually did exist in Joplin and was a pretty interesting place. Scandalous as all get-out, of course. It was not, however, constructed until the late 1890's. So, yeah, I totally lied. One of the small pleasures of fiction writing is having the luxury to just make stuff up.